, then I might have stayed in my fatherland and
in my own house, and I might have had the powerful of this world for my
friends."[10]

He sojourned for longer or shorter periods in Strasbourg, Augsburg,
Ulm, and other cities, but nowhere was he safe from his enemies, and he
always faced the prospect of banishment even from his place of
temporary sojourn. {69} Furious declarations were passed against him
by the Schmalkald League in 1540, for to his anti-Lutheran views on the
sacraments he had now added teachings on the nature of Christ which the
theologians pronounced unorthodox. Three years later he sent a
messenger to Luther in hope of a friendly understanding. Luther's
answer was brief and final: "The stupid fool, possessed by the devil,
understands nothing. He does not know what he is babbling. But if he
won't stop his drivel, let him at least not bother me with the booklets
which the devil spues out of him."[11] At the ministerial Council of
Protestant States in 1556 Schwenckfeld was denounced in the most
vituperous language of the period, and the civil authorities were urged
to proceed against him as a dangerous heretic. He always had,
notwithstanding this pursuit of theological hate, many powerful
friends, and a large number of brave and devoted followers who were
glad to risk goods, home, and life for the sake of what was to them the
living Word of God. He died--or as his friends preferred to say, he
had a quiet and peaceful "home passage"--at Ulm in 1561. Of the
purity, the brave sincerity, the nobility, the outward and inward
consistency of his life there is no question. His enemies had no word
to say which reflected upon the motives of his heart or upon the
genuine piety of his life. His religion cost him all that he held dear
in the outer world--he had not taken "the cross at the softest
spot"--and he practised his faith as the most precious thing a man
could possess in this world or in any other.

We must now turn to a study of his type of Christianity, which will be
presented here not in the order of its historical development, but as
it appears in perspective in his life and writings. He does not ground
his conception of salvation, his idea of religion _ueberhaupt_, as the
humanistic Reformers, Denck, Buenderlin, Entfelder, and Franck, do, on
the essentially divine nature of the {70} soul in its deepest
reality,[12] nor again as the medieval mystics do, on the substantial
presence within the